The Open-Source vs. Proprietary War: Why Meta and Mistral Are Giving Away Models—and What They Gain

You download Llama 3 for free. It is powerful. It is open-source. You can run it on your own hardware. You can fine-tune it. You can inspect its weights. You wonder: why is Meta giving away this technology? What do they gain? They are not a charity. They are a corporation. There is a strategic reason. They are commoditizing the ecosystem. They are making AI a commodity. And they are positioning themselves to profit from the commodity. This is the open-source AI war. Meta, Mistral, and others…